Sustainability update: Our journey so far

As Scentre Group, the owner and operator of 42 Westfield Living Centres across Australia and New Zealand, we continuously come back to Our Purpose – creating extraordinary places, connecting and enriching communities.

We recognise the impacts and risks associated with climate change, and for that reason, we’re actively committed to exploring and implementing initiatives to improve the efficiency of our Living Centres and reduce our environmental impact.

Whilst there’s more work to be done to reach our targets – and the work in this area will continue to evolve – we’re excited to take you on the journey with us and share some of our achievements.

Our work so far

Our focus on reducing our environmental impact covers three key areas: energy, water and waste.

Energy

We are committed to having efficient and resilient assets. We have set a target to achieve net zero Scope 1 and Scope 2 emissions by 2030 across our wholly-owned Westfield Living Centres, with an interim target to achieve a 50% reduction by 2025. We are committed to ensuring that the electricity used to operate the Westfield Living Centres we 100% own will have no negative carbon impact by 2030.

Since 2014, we have achieved a 30% reduction in carbon emissions across our portfolio of Westfield Living Centres. This has been primarily driven by our focus on energy efficiency. We are tackling emissions reduction from energy use in two ways; we are using less electricity and we are creating our own through solar energy. By managing our Westfield Living Centres more efficiently, we reduced our electricity use in 2021 by 3.5%. We use the ‘Internet Of Things’ to understand the impact of changes we make to operating a centre. This means we can tweak our air conditioning system to make it more efficient without compromising our customers’ enjoyment of a cool Westfield visit on a hot summer’s day. Across many centres, these types of small changes have achieved big energy reductions.

We also generated 7.9 GWh of solar across our portfolio in 2021.

Water

Your average Westfield Living Centre and our retail partners use water to deliver you the best experience we can, but we also need to find smart ways to reduce the amount we use. Across 2019 and 2020 we put smart metering technology in place across our Australian Westfield centres to measure our water use. This technology means we can now swiftly detect water leaks, and this saw us save over 86 million litres of water across our Westfield Living Centres during 2021. To put that into context, that’s 34 Olympic swimming pools worth of H20.

Waste

We have a target to recover 90% of waste from operations by 2030 and an interim target of 75% by 2025, in 2021 we recovered 54%. We actively support our retailers to recycle all clear soft plastics, which are repurposed and get a second life as products such as coat hangers, furniture, bubble wrap and plastic sheeting. In 2021, we recovered 300 tonnes of soft plastics from our Westfield Living Centres.

For more information about our environmental impact and our approach as a responsible business, check out Scentre Group's 2021 Responsible Business Report. Our 2022 Responsible Business Report will be released at the end of March 2023.

Fast facts:

• We are committed to ensuring that the electricity used to run the Westfield Living Centres we 100% own will have no negative carbon impact by 2030, with an interim target to achieve a 50% reduction by 2025.
• We have achieved a 30% reduction in carbon (scope 1 and 2) emissions across our portfolio of Westfield Living Centres since 2014.
• We also generated 7.9 GWh of solar across our portfolio in 2021.
• From 2022, our New Zealand Westfield Living Centres are powered 100% by renewable electricity.
• We recycled 5,800 tonnes of organic food waste and gave 300 tonnes of soft plastics a second life in 2021.
• We were the only company in Australia or New Zealand to achieve ‘A’ list for Climate Change with the Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP) in 2021. By introducing smart metering across our centres we saved over 34 Olympic swimming pools worth of water during 2021.